Snowflake Data Compliance: Enhancing Native Features With A Unified Control Plane For Data

Updated October 30th, 2024

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Snowflake’s data compliance framework is designed to protect data integrity, security, and governance across all its data storage and processing operations.
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To ensure compliance with industry-standard regulations, Snowflake undergoes rigorous external audits that assess its system architecture and implementation. As a result, Snowflake has been awarded several global and industry-specific certifications like SOC Type II, FedRAMP, and HITRUST CSF.

Additionally, Snowflake’s data governance features help enterprises comply with major data protection laws and regulations across industries and geographies, such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.

This article covers Snowflake’s key data compliance features and how a unified control plane for data governance, like Atlan, can further enhance compliance capabilities.

Table of contents #

  1. Snowflake data compliance: Native features
  2. Snowflake data compliance with Atlan
  3. Summing up
  4. Snowflake data compliance: Related reads

Snowflake data compliance: Native features #

In addition to the compliance certifications, Snowflake provides native features that support data privacy and protection.

Compliance with regulations, such as the GDPR, often involves shared responsibility for data storage, movement, and processing. For instance, Snowflake’s data security features, such as Continuous Data Protection, time travel, cloning, dynamic data masking, and row access policies support compliance with GDPR and other data protection requirements.

Let’s see how.

GDPR compliance with Snowflake #


Several Snowflake features address GDPR compliance requirements:

For example, this masking policy ensures only data stewards can view a customer’s phone number:

CREATE OR REPLACE MASKING POLICY phone_number_mask AS (val string) RETURNS string ->
CASE
WHEN CURRENT_ROLE() IN ('DATA_STEWARD') THEN val
ELSE '********'
END;

You can do something similar with row access policies.

These features extend beyond GDPR, supporting other regulatory frameworks like CCPA, IRAP, etc.

Auditing and monitoring with Snowflake #


External audits require you to open up your systems for inspection. When that happens, your system’s security, integrity, and governance-related specifications will be tested.

Here are some compliance-ready features that can help you prove that you have a safe and secure platform for data storage, movement, and processing:

  • Network rules and security restrictions on data at rest and in transit: Snowflake lets you create network rules, apply network policies, and communicate via private endpoints to cloud-based object stores for internal stages.
  • Detailed logs of how and when any data was processed and which data platform components were involved: For this, Snowflake provides the query_history view in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema, which captures the exact query that was run to process your data.
  • Audit trail of who logged in, what action they performed, and what data they accessed: Snowflake also provides the access_history view in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema, which breaks down exactly which objects were accessed and modified, and which policies were referenced.

With these features, Snowflake provides a solid foundation for meeting your data compliance requirements. However, comprehensive compliance across a multi-tool data ecosystem often requires a broader scope – essentially, a control plane of data. This is where Atlan comes in.

Let’s see how an Altan + Snowflake setup can help you meet your organization’s compliance requirements.

Snowflake data compliance with Atlan #

Much like Snowflake, Atlan’s architecture is also based on a security-first approach that helps you achieve data integrity and security requirements.

Atlan works seamlessly with Snowflake and other tools in your stack, providing a unified view of data assets and applying consistent compliance standards across your data ecosystem.

Atlan’s compliance features include (but aren’t limited to):

For transparency, Atlan has a frequently-updated page that captures the latest statuses of all compliance standards and assessments. The FAQs concerning compliance are also useful for anyone looking to connect Snowflake and Atlan, especially for ensuring smooth operations while enabling compliance.

How Tide achieved GDPR compliance with Snowflake and Atlan #


Tide is a business banking & finance company that serves over 10% of all SMEs in the UK. It used Snowflake and Atlan to meet GDPR standards, reducing 50 days of manual work to just 5 hours.

Snowflake provided object tagging, while Atlan enabled column masking and automatic data tagging via Playbooks, ensuring GDPR compliance efficiently and securely.

Summing up #

Snowflake’s native features and certifications provide a solid foundation for data compliance. By adding Atlan as a control plane, enterprises gain a unified, ecosystem-wide view of compliance. This approach enables faster, automated data management processes and strengthens compliance across all data assets.

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